Boys 'N Berry Jam
by CaffieneKitty
Summary: A contemplative sequence of late summery vignettes, stuck together with jam. The boys are 8 and 4. John POV


**Disclaimer:** It's Kripke's world, I'm just spreading a little jam on it.

**Summary:** A contemplative chain of late summer-y vignettes, some funny, some schmoopy, stuck together with jam. John POV

**A/N:**As bass-ackwards as my life is lately, here is a sort of post-story tag for a story I haven't managed to write yet, despite the pages of notes and some research. And this came first. The story I haven't written yet was started solely to explain the origin of the jam in this one. I swear, someone put my brain in backwards. This is not the story I've been fighting with for nearly four weeks either, just a little thing that's been mostly done for a couple months, sneaking out under the radar. Unbeta'd, so it's all my fault.

-

**Boys 'n' Berry Jam**  
by CaffieneKitty  
- - -

Before they reached the end of her driveway, the boys had searched and inventoried the box the old widow had insisted John take.

A bag of sandwiches, slabs of ham a quarter-inch thick on home baked rolls. Another bag of fresh-baked rolls besides. A bag of familiar apples. A bundle of carrots, washed, roots and tops still on. And at the bottom of the box, several types of homemade jam in pint sealers, some still warm from the canner.

John hadn't thought the boys could get a jar open on their own, four-year-old Sammy almost certainly couldn't, but less than five miles down the road, there was a sucking _sssponk!_ of a home-sealed jam jar opening. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Dean met his father's reflected eyes before sliding his gaze oh-so-casually toward the window. Sammy was covering his mouth with both hands trying to hide a grin. John looked back to the road. They'd all been eating the widow's jam for a week or so now. No harm in the boys getting into it.

In the first hundred miles, the first four jam rules were established.

The first rule was "No jam-sandwich-making while the car is moving. Put the lid back on the jam and eat the ham sandwiches first." The corollary to the first rule, after the ham sandwiches were gone, was "A stop sign does not count as 'not moving' for the purposes of making jam sandwiches."

The second rule was "No eating jam straight from the jar. No, not even if you do find a spoon to use."

The third rule was "No drawing, painting, doodling or otherwise smearing your brother with jam. Either of you. I don't care if they're protection symbols."

The fourth rule was "Alright, that's it! The jam goes in the trunk until we get to the next hotel, where you are both getting hosed off, and then we are _all_ cleaning the car. Or you two can ride in the damned trunk and I'll keep the jam up front with me. No? Just try me."

Despite his admonitions, John's scowl never quite reached full-on forbidding. It was too busy fighting down the smirk that threatened to surface anytime he glanced in the rearview mirror. The car smelled like a fruit salad massacre, and his impishly downcast sons were purple. John could almost hear Mary's laugh when he looked at them. Made the mess almost worth it to remember her laugh.

When they reached a hotel, the sticky sounds of children peeling themselves off the back seat was almost entirely imaginary. To the boys' delight, the jam content of Sam's hair turned the hotel shampoo mauve.

It was well past dark by then, Sammy turning into a warm, dozy lump after the bath, and Dean rapidly crashing after the jam-induced sugar-high. The car-cleaning was left for morning.

-

The fifth jam rule was "Until we can get every last trace of the jam out of the car, the windows are to be kept rolled up tight."

The next morning when John went out to start the cleaning process, he discovered two things. First, that a black car smeared internally with jam and parked where August morning sunshine would hit it for an hour or two in after dawn makes a great fermentation chamber. Second, that if a vehicle in such condition has a window open wide enough for a four-year-old boy to wave his sticky fingers in the air currents when the vehicle is in motion, the car will become a mecca for bees.

Hundreds of them, crawling over the sun-warmed sticky patches, flying in and out of the window in squadrons. John stood and stared at the insects zipping past, around and through his car for a minute before opening all the doors wide and heading back into the hotel room for more coffee.

Later at a gas station with a self-serve car wash, John, Dean and Sammy scrubbed everywhere there were jam patches. The seats, the floor, the back of the front seat, under the front seat, the ceiling... "Dean? Do I want to know how the jam got on the ceiling? Never mind. I _know_ I don't want to know. Make sure it never happens again."

The Winchesters drove to the next town, the car smelling of rug shampoo and wildberry cider, pursued by disappointed bees.

-

Jam is good on bread. Jam is good on cereal. Jam is good in milk. Jam would be good on ice cream, if they had ice cream. "No, we don't have any ice cream, Sammy, sorry for mentioning it." Jam wasn't good on baloney, but was apparently okay if you licked the jam off and then ate the baloney afterward. Jam wasn't good in beans. Jam wasn't good in coffee either, John noted one morning, spluttering.

The sixth rule was "Jam doesn't go with everything." The corollary was "No, we _don't_ need to try it with everything."

-

The seventh rule was "Finish one jar of jam before you open another." The almost-immediate corollary was "This does not mean you can put half a cup of jam on a slice of bread and call it a sandwich in the name of finishing the jam faster."

They left the half-full jar of green gooseberry jam at Pastor Jim's, mostly by accident. Jim said that his parishioners brought him jam all the time, but that gooseberries didn't grow in the area. It reminded him of home, he had mentioned, quietly, and wouldn't say more.

John noticed the jam hadn't made it back to the car, and that the boys were being overtly sneaky, but didn't say anything. The pale berries were a bit too squashed-eyeball-like for even large amounts of sugar to lessen the effect anyway. No real loss. John and the boys waved at Pastor Jim, standing in the doorway of his house, as they pulled away.

-

The eighth rule was "If the jam can be used to help a hunt, it will be."

As it turned out, nixies like jam. They really, _really_ like jam. The last spoonful of blackberry in the bottom of the jar, left near the creek in the late afternoon, and the whole infestation was trapped. They were making happy drunken nixie noises as the lid went on, and kept making happy drunken nixie noises all the way back upstream to the ring of bilious yellow toadstools they'd come into the world through. When John went and checked the jar the next morning, it was empty, nixie-less and squeaky clean, right down into the threads of the lid.

-

The ninth and last rule was "When the jam is gone, it's gone. End of discussion."

Strawberry had turned out to be the universal favourite, so they'd saved a jar of the strawberry for last. The last few spoonfuls of the last jar rode in with the cans of beans and boxes of mac and cheese in the trunk, hotel to motel, bar fridge to bar fridge. They checked it once in a while to make sure it hadn't gone bad, but they didn't finish it off until weeks later.

Hunts were getting longer as the nights got shorter, and things that liked the dark came out to play. Dean was eight; John figured he could keep an eye on Sammy for an hour or two on their own in the hotel room. An hour or two away from the boys to go through county archives stretched into an afternoon. A couple hours of searching through the bush for an abandoned gravesite turned into an evening. Then a left turn instead of a right, a flashlight dropped down an embankment, and a one-hour reconnaissance turned into an eight-hour scramble in the dark, trying to find a black car on the side of an unlit road in the rain, John cursing himself with every sodden step.

He'd told Dean he'd be back that night. He'd said he was just going to be a couple hours, and be back with a pizza or something since the hotel had no kitchenette rooms.

Technically it was still that night when he pulled into the hotel parking lot. The sun wasn't cresting the horizon yet. Nothing was even open in this town at this hour, not even a gas station. John was soaked, muddy, foodless and so angry with himself he was shaking as he unlocked the hotel room door.

The first thing John saw was Dean, sitting backward on the desk chair facing the door, eyes closed lightly, one hand over a shotgun on his lap, chin resting on the chair back.

Dean's eyes opened as the room door did, and a tension in the boy's shoulders left as he recognized John. "Hi Dad," he murmured, eyes sliding half-closed again as he leaned back from his uncomfortable position and stretched. The imprint of the chair back seam was red on the underside of Dean's chin. Sammy was asleep across the end of the far bed in front of the static-filled TV. "You okay?"

"Yeah, m'fine, Dean. You're still up?"

"Mhmm," Dean slid the rifle carefully to the floor, then slid off the chair himself, feet thumping onto the carpet.

John pulled off his wet coat, watching Dean. "Was gone longer than I thought. Didn't mean to worry you."

Dean sat on the bed Sammy was sprawled on and shrugged. "Oh, I wasn't worried." He looked up at John through his eyelashes for a second, then dropped his head.

"Uh hunh," said John, "I'm glad you weren't, then." He pulled the chair over and started removing his muddy boots, watching Dean. "I didn't bring back a pizza, nothing was open. In the morning before we pack up, I promise we'll go for the biggest breakfast you've ever seen."

"'S okay, we had food," Dean yawned and swung his legs up onto the bed. "Sammy, he was maybe a little bit worried, so we had to use up the jam." He pointed at the side table with the coffee machine on it. "Saved you some," Dean said through another yawn.

Sitting by the coffee machine was half a kaiser roll spread thick with the last of the jam. Where Dean had gotten the roll from was a question for morning, maybe, or maybe it was another question best left unasked. By the time John looked back, Dean was asleep on top of the covers, his sock-covered toes brushing his brother's side.

John discovered Dean had made coffee too; chunky-style, grounds sifting around the bottom of the hotel carafe. He was beginning to like it that way. He ate the last of the jam and watched his boys sleep, planning for tomorrow.

- - -  
(end)


End file.
